THE purposes of biography
are manifold, but they have this common end: to interpret the subject
and show forth what manner of man he was of whom the writer writes. That
done faithfully, the biographer can launch his work upon the waters and
trust to the winds and the currents for a prosperous voyage.

But what is "faithfully"?
A patient and accurate accumulation of facts and events strung upon time
as boys used to hang rows of birds’ eggs upon strings? A cold, impartial
scrutiny of a life made from a judgment seat placed above the baffling
conflicts of doubting conscience, groping reason and weak desire?
Biographies may be so written. But the life of him who has stood in the
market place with a mission to his fellows, who has sought to bring
visions of greater dignity and power into the minds of the sleeping and
vegetating crowds, who has tried to gather scattered and indifferent men
into a mighty movement and to elevate discontented kickings against the
pricks into a crusade for the conquest of some Holy Land, cannot be
dealt with in that way. He must submit to the rigid scrutiny; the dross
that is in him, the mistakes and miscalculations which he made, must be
exposed with his virtues, wisdoms and good qualities. But to portray
such a man, the biographer has not only to scrutinise him objectively;
he must also tell how he appeared to, and was felt by, the people who
were influenced by him, and preserve for the future the hero or the
saint who received the homage of leadership and the worship of
affection. The glamour of the myth gathers round all great popular

leaders and becomes an
atmosphere as real to their personality as the colour of cloud and sun
is real to a landscape. Were we to separate what is inseparable, we
might say that such a man has two beings, that which the critic alone
can see, dissecting him as though he lay a lifeless thing upon a table,
and that which the artist sees regarding him as one of the living
formative forces of his time.

In the latter way the
biography of Keir Hardie must be treated if it is to be a full
interpretation of the man. Mr. Stewart, who has done this book, writes
of his hero, frankly and unashamedly, as a worshipper. He is a disciple
who for many years has enjoyed the intimacy of his master, and he sees
with the eye and writes with the pen which reveal the inspiring leader
to us. He has gathered from a great mass of details the outstanding
incidents in Hardie’s life, and through the deeds has shown the man. He
has also preserved for all who may read his book, and especially for
those in whose memories those precious days of pioneering have no place,
the inspiration that made the work possible and brought forth from chaos
the Labour Movement.

Everyone who came in
contact with Hardie felt his personality right away at the outset. His
power never lay in his being at the head of a political organisation
which he commanded, for the organisation of the Independent Labour Party
was always weak compared with its influence, and he had ceased to be an
official of the miners before their combination became really
formidable; nor did it lie in his ability to sway the crowd by divine
gifts of speech and appeal, for his diction though beautifully simple
was rarely tempestuous, and his voice had few of the qualities that
steal into the hearts of men and stir them in their heights and depths;
more certainly still he never secured a follower by flattery nor won the
ear of a crowd by playing down to it. He set a hard task before his
people and gave them great ends to pursue. He left no man in peace in
the valley gutter, but winded them on the mountain tracks. What then was
the secret of the man? I who have seen him in all relationships, at the
height of triumph and the depths of humiliation, on the platform and at
the fireside, dignified amongst strangers and merry amongst friends,
generally fighting by his side But sometimes in conflict with him,
regard that secret as first of all his personality and then his proud
esteem for the common folk and his utter blindness to all the
decorations of humanity. He was a simple man, a strong man, a gritty
man.

Hardie was of the “old
folk.” Born in a corner of Scotland where there still lingered a belief
in the uncanny and the superhuman, where Pan’s pipes were still heard in
the woods, the kelpie still seen at the fords and the fairy still met
with on the hills, and born in the time of transition when the heart and
imagination paid homage whilst the reason was venturing to laugh, he
went out into the world with a listening- awe in his soul; brought up in
surroundings eloquent with the memory of sturdy men who trusted to the
mists to shield them from the murderous eyes of the Claverhouses and
their dragoons, and dotted with the graves and the monuments of martyrs
to a faith—dreary moors “where about the graves of the martyrs the
whaups are crying,” and grey farmhouses where in the “killing times”
women lamented over their husbands and sons murdered at their doors for
loyalty to God and the Covenant— surroundings, moreover, which in later
times had seen Burns at the plough dejected, and had heard him singing
his songs of love, of pity, of gaiety, he went out a strong man in heart
and in backbone, with the spirit of great tradition in him; nurtured by
a mother who faced the hard world like a woman of unconquerable soul,
whose tears were followed by defiance and whose sighs ended with
challenge, he went out like a knight armed with a sword which had the
magic of conquest tempering its steel. That was his birthright, and that
birthright made him a gentleman, whether running errands for a baker in
Glasgow, or facing the “overfed beasts” on the benches of the House of
Commons. Such men never fear the face of men and never respect their
baubles.

From the same sources
came his comfort in the common folk. All great human discovery is the
discovery of the wisdom that comes from babes and sucklings, as all
great artistic achievement depends on the joy that dwells in the simple.
It has been said that there is the false ring of peevishness in Burns’
“A man’s a man for a’ that,” and it may be that resentment gives a
falsetto note to some of the lines. But when the great labour leader
comes, whether he be born from the people or not will be of little
concern, the decisive thing will be whether he values in his heart, as
Burns did, the scenes and the people from which spring not only
“Scotia’s grandeur,” but the power which is to purify society and expose
the falseness and the vulgarity of materialist possession and class
distinctions. The mind of the labour leader must be too rich to do
homage to “tinsel show,” too proud of its own lineage to make obeisance
to false honour, and too cultured to be misled by vulgar display.

A title, Dempster merits
it;
A gfarter gie to Willie Pitt;
Gie wealth to some be-ledger’d cit,
In cent, per cent.
But give me real sterling wit,
And I’m content.

A working class living in
moral and social parasitism on its “betters” will only increase the
barrenness and the futility of life. In the end, it is perhaps a matter
of good taste and self-respect, and these are birthrights and are not
taught in the schools. They belong to the influences which life
assimilates as plants assimilate a rich or an impoverished air and sap.
Perhaps the Scotsman is peculiarly fortunate in this respect. No country
has had a meaner aristocracy or a sturdier common people. Partly its
education, partly its history, partly its church government and system
of worship, partly the frugality which nature imposed upon it for so
many generations, laid up a store of independence in the characters of
many of its people, and Burns awoke this into activity. I doubt if any
man who received the historical birthright of Scotsmen at his birth,
ever accepted a tinsel honour without feeling that he was doing wrong
and somehow abandoning his country.

Be these things as they
may, Hardie had those native qualities which never became incompetent to
value the honour and the worth of a kitchen fireside, of a woman who,
like his mother, toiled in the fields, of a man who earned his living by
the sweat of his brow, subduing Heaven the while. He said a life-long
Amen to the words which Scott puts in the mouth of Rob Roy on Glasgow
bridge: “He that is without name, without friends, without coin, without
country, is still at least a man; and he that has all these is no more”—Hardie’s
democratic spirit might have added “and is often something less.” When
he became famous, his world widened and he mixed with people in
different circumstances. But he met them as the self-respecting workman,
all unconscious of difference and with neither an attempt nor a desire
to imitate them. The drawing rooms of the rich never allured him into a
sycophantic servitude, a chair at a workman’s fireside hard to sit upon
never robbed that fireside of its cheery warmth. The true gentleman is
he who acts like a gentleman unconsciously. Therefore, this quality
eludes him who would write of it, for an explanation of it suggests
consciousness of it. Only when the ruling class habits sought to impose
themselves on him by authority did he resent them and become conscious
of his own nature—as when he went to the House of Commons in a cloth
cap, or when, in an outburst of moral loathing, he replied to the jeers
of a band who had returned to the House radiant in the garb and the
demeanour of those who had risen from a well replenished table, by the
epithet “well-fed beasts,”—and then his native good taste speedily
asserted itself and he became natural.

Experience in the world
strengthened this part of his nature. Whether as a baker’s messenger
forced to pass moral judgment on the man of substantial respectability,
or as a Trade Union official studying the results of the work of
directors, managers and such like, or as a politician in touch with the
political intelligence and general capacity of “the ruling classes,” he
saw no inferiority in his fellow workmen. He found them careless,
disorganised, indifferent; but their lives remained real and their
common interests were the true interests. They were the robust stem upon
which every desirable thing had to be engrafted.

Thus it was that the
sober people, the people prepared for idealistic effort, the people
whose ears detected the ring of a genuine coin and had become tired of
the spurious or ill-minted thing, the people who were laying the
foundations of their new cities on the rock of human worth, were drawn
to him, honoured him, believed in him and loved him. It is very
difficult for a man made of that material to do justice to “the classes”
in these times—to their qualities, their lives, their interests, and
even their worships—but Hardie was catholic, and rarely have his friends
heard from his lips an unjust condemnation of those people. Charity lay
even in his most emphatic condemnations.

Of Hardie’s work it is
easy to judge even at this early day, so distinctive was it. He will
stand out for ever — as the Moses who led the children of labour in this
country out of bondage—out of bondage, not into Canaan, for that is to
be a longer job. Others had described that bondage, had explained it,
had told what ought to come after it. Hardie found the labour movement
on its industrial side narrowed to a conflict with employers, and
totally unaware that that conflict, if successful, could only issue in a
new economic order; on its political side, he found it thinking only of
returning to Parliament men who came from the pits and workshops to do
pretty much the same work that the politicians belonging to the old
political parties had done, and totally unaware that Labour in politics
must have a new outlook, a new driving force of ideas and p. new
standard of political effort. When he raised the flag of revolt in
Mid-Lanark, he was a rebel proclaiming civil war; when he fought the old
Trade Union leaders from the floor of Congress, he was a sectary; when
the Independent Labour Party was formed in Bradford, it was almost a
forlorn hope attacked by a section of Socialists on the one hand and by
the labour leaders in power on the other. What days of fighting, of
murmuring, of dreary desert trudging were to follow, only those who went
through them know. Through them, a mere handful of men and women
sustained the drudgery and the buffetings. Hardie’s dogged—even
dour—persistence made faint-heartedness impossible. One has to think of
some of those miraculous endurances of the men who defied hardship in
the blank wilderness,

the entangled forest, the
endless snowfield, to get an understanding of the exhaustion of soul and
mind and body which had to be undergone between 1890 and 1900, in order
to create a Labour Movement.

For this endurance Hardie
had an inexhaustible inner resource. He knew

The hills where his life
rose,
And the sea where it goes.

He was one of the
sternest champions which his class has ever produced, and yet his was no
class mind. His driving and resisting power was not hate nor any of the
feelings that belong to that category of impulse. When I used the
expression “communal consciousness,” for the first time in a book I had
written, as the antithesis to “class consciousness,” which some
Socialists regarded as the shibboleth test of rectitude, he wrote me
saying that that was exactly what he felt. But even that was not
comprehensive enough. His life of sense was but the manifestations of
the spirit, and to him “the spirit” was something like what it was to
the men whose bones lay on the Ayrshire moors under martyrs’ monuments.
It was the grand crowned authority of life, but an authority that spoke
from behind a veil, that revealed itself in mysterious things both to
man’s heart and eyes. He used to tell us tales and confess to beliefs,
in words that seemed to fall from the lips of a child. Had he not found
his portion where blows had to be given and to be fended, and where the
mind had to be actively wary every moment of the day in advancing and
retreating, he would have been one of an old time to whom a belief in
mystic signs and warnings would have been reverence and not
superstition, and by whom such signs would have been given. Those who
knew him have often met him looking as though a part of him were absent
in some excursion in lands now barred to most of mankind. This, I
believe, explains the hospitality he always gave to every new attempt to
express the truth, explains his devotion to the cause of women as it was
in his lifetime and, above all, explains the mysterious affinity there
was between himself and children. His whole being lay under the shadow
of the hand of the crowned Authority which told him of its presence now
by a lightning flash, now by a whisper, and now by a mere tremor in his
soul like what the old folk believed went through the earth when night
died and the day was born. The world was life, not things to him.

Thus, his Socialism was
not an economic doctrine, not a formula proved and expressed in
algebraic signs of x and y. He got more Socialism from Burns than from
Marx; “The Twa Dogs,” and “A Man’s a Man for a’ that7’ were more
prolific text books for his politics than “Das Kapital.” This being the
spirit of his handiwork, the Independent Labour Party, is one reason why
it became the greatest political influence of our time and threw into an
almost negligible background, both in its enthusiastic propaganda and
practical capacity, all other Socialist bodies in this country.

The inconsistencies which
are essential attributes of human greatness are the cause of much
trouble to the ordinary man, but these inconsistencies do not belong to
the same order of things as the unreliabilities of the charlatan or the
changefulness of the time-server. Hardie’s apparent waywardness often
gave his colleagues concern. He was responsive to every movement and
hospitable to the most childlike thoughts— —so much so that in a battle
he not infrequently seemed to be almost in the opposing ranks, as at
that Derby Conference, described by Mr. Stewart, when he sorely tried
the loyalty of our own women by going out of his way to greet those who
had done everything in their power to harass and insult them. A great
man has so many sides to which the various voices of the day make
appeal. He is not only one man but several—not only man, but woman too.
But greatness is inconsistent only in the things that do not matter very
much, and in the grand conflict of great issues he stood up as reliable
as a mighty boulder in a torrent. The strength of hills was his for
exactly the same reason as he had the trustful mind of a child. What
appeared to be inconsistency was indeed many sidedness. No man was more
generously international in his outlook and spirit, and yet to the very
core of his being he was a Scotsman of Scotsmen, and it is not at all
inappropriate that I came across him first of all at a meeting to demand
Home Rule for Scotland. A man who held in no special esteem the “book
leaf"of universities, he, nevertheless, warmed in interest to all kinds
of lore, and he read choicely and was ever ready to sit at the feet of
whomsoever had knowledge to impart. Always willing to listen, he was
never ready to yield; loyal like a man, he was, nevertheless, persistent
in his own way sometimes to a fault; humble in the councils of friends,
he was proud in the world. Looking back at him now, the memory of his
waywardness only adds to affection and admiration. One sees how
necessary it was for his work.

There is one other
inconsistency of greatness which he showed only to friends. He could
stand alone, and yet he could not. “No one can ever know,” he once said
to me, “what suffering a man has to endure by misrepresentation.” He
required a corner in the hearts of his people where he could rest and be
soothed by regard. He therefore felt keenly every attack that was
crudely cruel. For instance he was sorely struck by the brutally vile
cartoon which “Punch” published of him when he was in India. (I knew of
the letters which Lord Minto was sending home expressing pleasure at his
conduct in India, and I cheered him by telling him of them.)

But sorest of all was the
wound which the war made upon him. Like every intelligent man who kept
his head, he saw that the most worthless elements in the country would
ride the whirlwind, that the people would be worked up into a state of
mind that would not only defy every appeal to reason, but would prolong
the agony and settle it, as all wars have hitherto been settled, by
crushing debts, ruined ideals and a peace which would only be a truce to
give time for the sowing of new seeds of war. He knew that when the
clash came it could^ .not be ended until the conditions of a settlement
arose, and he joined heartily with the small group in the country who
took the view that those conditions were political and not military, and
that, therefore, whilst the soldier was holding the trenches, the
politician should be as busy as the munition worker creating the
political weapons which were to bring peace. He also knew that, when the
war comes, the safety of every country is endangered by its enemy and
that adequate steps must be taken to protect it. But he saw that problem
in its fulness and not with military blinkers limiting his vision to
recruitment, guns and poison gas. He was quite well aware that the sky
would speedily be darkened by black clouds of lies and
misrepresentations, innocent and deliberate. That was in the day’s work,
and he knew that in time the attitude of his colleagues and himself
would first of all be understood and that, later on, people would wonder
why it took them so long to see the same things. He saw the Treaty of
Versailles before 1915 was very far spent, and he was content to endure
and wait. That is not how he was wounded. The deadly blow was given by
the attitude of old colleagues. When he returned from his first meeting
in his constituency on the outbreak of war, described by Mr. Stewart, he
was a crushed man, and, sitting in the sun on the terrace of the House
of Commons where I came across him, he seemed to be looking out on blank
desolation. From that he never recovered. Then followed the complete
mergence of the Labour Party in the war-lusty crowd. The Independent
Labour Party kept as trusty as ever, but he felt that his work was over,
that all he could do in his lifetime was to amount to no more than
picking up some of the broken spars of the wreckage. As Bunyan puts it,
“a post had come from the celestial city for him.” And so he died.

The outlook has already
changed. The floods are subsiding and his work stands. We are still too
near to that work to see it in its detailed historical relations; the
day and its events are too pressingly close and urgent to enable us to
view the results of it in a lasting setting. Of this we are assured,
however : in its great purposes and general achievements it is
permanent. It is well with him and his memory.

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